Russell Means (1939 - 2012) was an Oglala Sioux from South Dakota. He perished from Mother Earth on October 22, 2012. He was an outspoken advocate for the rights of indigenous people in North and South America. He also appeared in many Hollywood films, and was active in the Libertarian party as a nominee to represent the party as a presidential candidate in 1987, coming in second to Congressman Ron Paul...

We live in a world of rules made by men in suits and neckties. Free-spirited weirdoes have difficulty coping with the nonsense of conformity and have an overwhelming desire for self-expression -- the weirder the better. Some thousand years ago, ancient Druids (Celtic paganism) practiced human sacrifice to please their gods. They created giant effigies out of wood, called "Wicker Man," with criminals trapped inside, and set them ablaze...

In the late 1970s, I was a fool. I married the wrong woman and worked hard to get ahead. In the early 1980s, I regained my sanity. I divorced my wife and escaped the rat race. I owned a house, with a pool, before the marriage. After the divorce, my ex-wife owned a house and I had peace of mind...

I lived in the Los Angeles area for 11.5 years (1975-1986), where I also moved a dozen times within the area for various reasons, including a 5-year marriage and subsequent divorce. I particularly liked the village of Topanga, in the hills between the San Fernando Valley and the ocean, above Malibu, and lived in 3 different locations in those hills...

Many years ago, a bolt of lightning struck an oak tree in my parent's yard, about 20 feet outside the window where my mother was standing at the time. She told me it was very loud and the whole room became a bright pink. A neighbor across the street witnessed the strike. There was an explosion, followed by a gigantic ball of fire, followed by a huge puff of smoke. The tree was totally destroyed, scattered into pieces across the entire front yard...

A hero is someone who understands the responsibility of this existence and reacts accordingly. Pamela Murphy died on April 8, 2010, at age 90. She had spent 35 years as a patient liaison at the Sepulveda Veterans Administration in southern California, where she gave special treatment to every soldier under her care. ...

Many strange artifacts have been discovered over the years that don't conform to the current theories of the history of man. An educational website called "About, Inc." lists the 10 most puzzling ancient artifacts. 1) The Grooved Spheres. For several decades, miners in South Africa have been digging up mysterious spheres made of a blue metal...

When I first moved into my current abode in the Land of Ark, many moons ago, I had my parents over for a barbecue. During the evening, a light bulb in the kitchen burned out. I stood on a wobbly stool that my dad was clutching to keep steady. I unscrewed the dead light bulb, passed it down to my mother who then handed me another light bulb which I then secured into place...

Ocean voyages tended to be melancholy undertakings in ancient times. In 1830, the captain of a British naval survey ship, the HMS Beagle, put a bullet in his head during a period of intense gloom. The following year, Robert FitzRoy, a 23-year-old gentleman of nobility, was given command of the vessel and assigned the formal task of charting coastal waters...

In 1970, a U.S. Athena missile was fired from a location in Utah, scheduled to land in the White Sands Missile Base in New Mexico. However, it went about 900 miles off course, without apparent explanation, and crashed in the Sonora Desert in Mexico, over a hundred miles south of the Big Bend area in Texas...

"The world is incomprehensible, thus we must treat the world as it is -- a sheer mystery." Carlos Castaneda The Dogon is a small African tribe in the southwest corner of the Sahara Desert. A thousand years ago, the Dogon collectively refused to convert to Islam. Thereafter, Islamic law classified the Dogon, as well as other groups in the region, as being fair game for slavery, which included the murder of the males and enslavement of the women and children...

Over two thousand years ago, the Imperial Roman Empire attempted to conquer the world. They built the first long-distant roads in Europe (and England) for their army to access the new lands. These roads have been used ever since. The standard Roman war chariots were initially created just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. These Roman chariots formed the initial ruts in these newly-formed roads...

Except for conceiving and raising them, one of the hardest things involved with bringing children into the world is agreeing on a name. For many years, Michael has been the most popular name in the USA for a boy. Lately, names like Cody, Wyatt and Dustin have been moving up the list in popularity...

The following true story came in first place in a Criminal Lawyers Award Contest. A Charlotte, NC, lawyer purchased a box of expensive cigars, then insured them against fire (among other things). Within a month having smoked his entire stockpile of these great cigars and without yet having made even his first premium payment on the policy, the lawyer filed a claim against the insurance company. The lawyer claimed the cigars were lost “in a series of small fires.”...

In the 1990s, Professor William A. Tiller created an experiment whereby a small black box was fitted with a simple electrical circuit and plugged it into a wall socket. Then four people who were highly experienced meditators gathered around a table where the black box was located in the center of the table. ...

In his 1918 book titled TRIVIA, British Author Logan Pearsall Smith (1865 - 1946) wrote "I know too much; I have stuffed too many of the facts of History and Science into my intellectuals. My eyes have grown dim over books; believing in geological periods, cave dwellers, Chinese Dynasties, and the fixed stars has prematurely aged me."...

The greatest threat to individual freedom is an efficient bureaucracy. However, government is a necessary evil. If everyone took responsibility for their own behavior and cooperated on the basis of trust, we would have no need for regulation and oversight. Unfortunately, the human race is imperfect and must enforce a set of reasonable rules to prevent injustice. But the imperfection of the human race often creates a set of unnecessary, unreasonable rules, creating even more injustice...

According to researchers at the John Hopkins School of Medicine, fatal mistakes in hospitals and health care facilities are the third leading cause of death in the USA. The following are the five leading causes of death in the USA. • Heart Disease -- 614,348 deaths per year...

Free at Last Monday, January 18, 2021, is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the third Monday in January of each year. In 1955, at age 26, Martin Luther King, Jr. was thrust into civil-rights leadership in Montgomery, Alabama, after Rosa Parks had made her courageous stand not to move to the back of the bus...

William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their 1997 book titled THE FOURTH TURNING, theorize that society has a collective personality that changes on a regular cyclical basis. This cycle repeats itself every four generations (every 80 to 100 years), with each generation having a distinct persona...